Ironically, however, repudiating the Protocol makes preserving the Agreement more likely quashing the EU’s harmful meddling will reduce the tensions it has improvidently raised. Unfortunately, for some US political leaders, the Good Friday Agreement involves not international theology but theological theology. In all post-Brexit matters, people should get used to the idea that London owes Brussels no subservience. Since the central issue is trade between parts of the UK, allowing external judges any say whatever is astonishing and illegitimate, like allowing Canada to dictate terms of trade between Alaska and the Lower Forty-Eight. Consider merely one aspect of a Bill introduced in Parliament on Monday, eliminating the role of EU judges in disputes involving the Protocol. This logic is crucial to democratic, constitutional sovereignty. Many if not most international agreements have withdrawal clauses, but even without one, a state cannot be bound under a deal when the parties’ fundamental expectations were based on erroneous understandings at the time or later. Moreover, if you want an “international law” justification, the doctrine of rebus sic stantibus (roughly, “as things now stand”) permits a sovereign state to reject prior commitments on the basis of changed circumstances. Treaties or other international accords stand in no better place than domestic legislation. Ultimately, the only legitimacy for governmental acts is the consent of the governed, which is why reversing prior legislative action is easily understood. In the United States, the number of politicians prepared to say that the Constitution and laws enacted thereunder are subordinate to international law is between few and none, for good reason.Īmerican and British constitutional law is well-settled that treaties can be modified or vitiated by subsequent legislation no legislature can control the acts of its successors. The most fundamental point is whether national law prevails over international law when the two conflict. This is surely the easiest argument to refute, but a very important one for America, whose real interests are completely opposite to Biden’s views.

EU high priests and their US acolytes conjure visions of hell if the UK abrogates any part of the Protocol as a “violation of international law.”

The Protocol is essentially a trade issue, pragmatically resolvable as such issues normally are, but for the EU’s insistence on communitaire theology and its determination to punish the one country that has flatly told it to go pound sand. But aside from London and Dublin, the two parties of real interest, this issue is almost solely a matter of theological importance for the international Left in its assault on the legitimacy of even democratically based national sovereignty. And while Northern Ireland should not be used to relitigate the Brexit decision, that is precisely what the EU overlords, through their Irish surrogate, are attempting. Why, exactly, is the Protocol so important to Biden, and how should Boris Johnson react? Presumably, Britain and Ireland can look out for their own national interests and seek US involvement if they mutually agree. They unreservedly accept both the EU claim that the Northern Ireland Protocol is essentially inviolable, and Ireland’s posture that unilateral British changes to the Protocol could mortally wound the Good Friday Agreement. What position should America take in the Northern Ireland dispute between the UK and the EU? President Joe Biden and key Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi think the answer is easy.

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